From the archive: October 9 1930

A time limit for shopping

Hereford City Council has decided that twenty minutes is long enough for a woman to spend inside any one shop - long enough, at least, to leave her motor-car outside.

The decision was reached only by the casting vote of the Mayor, but the Mayor this year is a woman, herself a great shopper, who should know if anyone does how long it really takes to buy a new hat. It will, one imagines, be welcomed by everybody but the guilty few.

When the distinction between "buying" and "shopping" was first made by "Punch" many years ago, the "shoppers" in the strict sense of the word were a nuisance only to others who came into the shop with intent to buy. But now, when they park their cars in the streets as well as their persons at the counter, they are the plague of everyone who ventures into the neighbourhood.

Who has not seen Manchester's King Street in the afternoon, with a continuous row of cars parked on either side of the already narrow carriageway and leaving just enough room for one vehicle to slip through at a snail's pace. Nor is the obstruction confined to King Street.

Even the shopkeeper should acclaim the twenty-minutes rule, for the woman who takes an hour to buy a hat is simply wasting forty minutes of his assistant's time. The Mayor of Hereford has lit a torch which should set beacons burning all over the country.

A Bridge-Breaker

[The fashionable novelist Hugh Walpole had attacked the game of bridge as not only a spoiler of tempers and of decent conversation but of married happiness. "Probably it causes more dissension than any other thing," he declared.]

The bridge-players might reply that there are contentious conversationalists even as there are cross card-players. But it is easy to envisage the atmosphere to which Mr. Walpole has been exposed and against which he revolts.

There are those who regard the person who cannot "make up a four at bridge" as a failure in the scheme of things. In some sections of English society very much the same view would be taken of one who had no taste for shooting or fishing or hunting. The difference is that it is easy to keep out of the company of shooters and fishers and hunters, but almost impossible to mix socially with your fellow-men and yet never find yourself among card-players.

However, he is not alone; there are many with no heads for bridge and a private conviction that conversation indicates the higher type of intelligence. All these will note with approval the counterattack launched by Mr. Walpole at Keswick yesterday.

Historic articles from the Guardian archive, compiled by the Guardian research and information department (follow us on Twitter @guardianlibrary). For further coverage from the past, take a look at the Guardian & Observer digital archive, which contains every issue of both newspapers from their debut to 2000 - 1.2m items, fully searchable and viewable online